This invention relates to agricultural produce material rotating tub grinders, and more particularly to livestock hay and such feed grinders.
Hay, after being cut and dried in windrows in the field, is usually baled today in the form of large heavy round bales, weighing from 900 to 2000 pounds each. Those bales are stacked in the field for later use. Sometimes the hay is baled as smaller hay bales, or even just piled in a haystack or pile. To avoid waste the farmer grinds the hay in the field into small pieces by a suitable grinder, for feeding his livestock, and then he transports the ground hay to a suitable bin for later feed use. That grinding is usually done by a rotating grinder operable by power from a tractor. Such heretofore conventional grinders have a horizontal flat floor with a rotor grinder mill in an opening in the floor. Such grinders have heretofore been inefficient due to defects in their construction and operation, which has resulted in a mass of the hay bridging in the tub grinder, during the operation of grinding on the floor and causing a stalling disruption of operation. That bridging mass would pile up against the grinder and prevent the grinder from efficient operation in the flat floor. To overcome such bridging or blocking heretofore various devices and methods have been endeavored to cure the defects, such as by lessening the size of the grinder in the floor only to a portion of the radius of the rotating tub as the machine is operated which would cause only a part of the material therein to contact the grinder, and some of it would as a result be left unground in the center of the tub. Further, heretofore large heavy iron floor fins have been fastened to the floor in an effort to cause the hay moved thereagainst on the inside of the tub on the floor to be directed toward the rotor grinder in the floor, and such heavy fins were expensive to make and needlessly heavy of construction and machine operation, requiring more power input from the tractor than otherwise needed, with a resultant loss of grinder power and efficiency. Thus there has been a continuing need for a lighter and more efficient and less expensive to make machine grinder, in the form of operable tub grinders in the industry, and to grind large heavy bales.
Further, there heretofore has been complicated methods of inserting the hay or other fibrous material to be ground into the rotating tub, such as by separate conveyors, or manual labor, resulting in a loss of manpower and the need of extra expensive adjunct loader conveyors and machinery.
Also in the industry heretofore, after the rotating grinder chopped the fibrous material, by its rotor in the floor, then there has been an extra conveyor required thereunder to convey the chopped material to a desirous point. Such an extra conveyor was needed to deposit the ground material in a pile or in an elongated rib of the material, when it was used to feed cattle in the field, for example.
In the use of such heretofore rotating hay grinders used to grind modern round heavy 900-2000 pound bales of hay, there is insufficient power available when used with older tractors, manufactured about ten years or more ago, to operate the heretofore known grinders to cut up such heavy bales, and because of the inefficiency of the grinder used. Those old tractors, while still operable and useable, did not produce sufficient R.P.M. at the power take-off, 540 such R.P.M. to operate their grinders efficiently mainly because of the wasted power required to operate such inefficient machines. Heretofore, rotor grinders used rotating knife cutter-type blades, wherein the longitudinal edge of each cutter blade contacted the hay and pulled and broke the hay up and literally did not properly cut it, because of too much cutting edge. The machine of this invention is, among others, adaptable for use with the older just mentioned weaker 540 R.P.M. PTO take off tractors, because the rotating grinder of this invention has been simplified in the form of smaller longer end edge cutter hammer-blade-blowers, and so is adaptable for use not only with 100 horsepower of not over 540 R.P.M. PTO tractors, but as well with more powerful modern tractors.
This invention for the first time, as far as known, has perfected a rotor cutter grinder consisting of a plurality of broadside blades with each blade end as a sharpened cutter edge, for clean cutting of the hay strands by the shorter end edge cutters, and with less power being required to operate the rotor cutter because of the smaller end cutter edges width of the rotor blades, each being of substantially less cutter edge by several times than the overall longitudinal length cutting edge as heretofore previously used in rotor cutters.